Teachers have been working without a contract for nearly a year. | NBC 7 San Diego

Teachers Plan Rally Amid Labor Dispute | NBC 7 San Diego:

Teachers Plan Rally Amid Labor Dispute

Teachers have been working without a contract for nearly a year.

San Diego Unified educators are calling on the school board to settle the remaining five issues standing in the way of a new contract for teachers. Teachers have been working without a contract for nearly a year.

The union representing teachers, San Diego Education Association, held a Tuesday afternoon rally at district headquarters in the 4100-block of Normal Street.

"Teachers need to make enough money to be able to support their families on a single income, so they don't have to work two jobs," said union spokeswoman Lindsay Burningham. "We have teachers who are working two or three jobs that are taking away from time they'd want to devote to their students and their families."

On March 16, the two sides declared an impasse, but the district and the union are still at the bargaining table trying to reach an agreement on class sizes, support staff, teacher prep time, enrichment classes and pay and benefits.

A district spokeswoman says San Diego Unified has reached a tentative agreement to lower class sizes in grades K-3 to 24 students per one teacher in the class room. They are still negotiating whether to lower class sizes in the upper grades.

The district has also reached a tentative agreement to increase nurses counselors, psychologists and special education support, and to increase prep time and provide more enrichment classes for students, according to San Diego Unified spokeswoman Linda Zintz.

The district has reached a tentative agreement with the union to cover the full cost of teacher’s benefits packages at a cost of $100 million a year. Salary increases are still on the table, Zintz said. 

Entry level base pay for San Diego Unified teachers is about $42,200 a year; $64,130 is the mid-range; and the maximum is $87,177, according to the district. The average taxpayer cost per SDEA member for benefits is $15,160 per year.

Compared to other districts in the county the median base pay for San Diego Unified teachers is slightly lower, according to numbers provided by Transparent California, a website that collects salary information about public employees in California. It is associated with the California Policy Center, a nonprofit organization that monitors and analyzes how California government spends money.

According to Transparent California, the median base pay for San Diego Unified teachers is $66,127 compared to $75,719 in median base pay at the nearby Sweetwater Union High School District, which does not serve K-6 students. At Vista Unified, the median base pay for teachers is $69,411 where at Grossmont Union High School district, it’s $75,167.

• "Serious Situation": Water Board Approves Cutbacks

However, San Diego Unified has 22 percent of its teachers with a total compensation package that places them making above $100,000 annually, according to the data.

For pay, the union is asking for a seven percent increase across the board to make their pay more comparable to other districts in the region.

San Diego Unified spokeswoman Zintz said the district was limited in the information it can provide because of ongoing labor negotiations.

Voice of San Diego Education Reporter Mario Koran said if the district meets all

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One of Georgia's longest-ever criminal trials is over, and it's sending teachers to prison for up to 7 years - Yahoo Finance

One of Georgia's longest-ever criminal trials is over, and it's sending teachers to prison for up to 7 years - Yahoo Finance:

One of Georgia's longest-ever criminal trials is over, and it's sending teachers to prison for up to 7 years

Eight former Atlanta educators have been sentenced to between one and seven years in prison for participating in a massive cheating ring, Reuters is reporting.

The criminal cheating trial in Atlanta could have sent the school teachers to prison for up to 20 yearsfor allegedly violating a law originally enacted to go after mobsters.

Prosecutors used Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) to accuse former principals, teachers, and administrators of trying to boost their bonuses by conspiring to artificially raise kids' test scores. 

"There were thousands of children that were harmed in this thing," Judge Jerry Baxter said during sentencing, according to Reuters. Later, he added, "It’s like the sickest thing that’s ever happened to this town."

Baxter had urged the educators and prosecutors to try to negotiate a plea agreement so the teachers could have avoided jail, The New York Times reported Monday. Addressing the defendants, he reportedly said, “Somehow this morning it just came to me, you know, that the only reason that I’d send you to jail is for retribution."

Most of the defendants never made plea agreements, though.

Three of the 11 educators found guilty of RICO violations technically got 20-year sentences, but the judge said they'd only have to spend seven of those years in prison. (The rest could be on probation.) Two more educators will serve two years in prison and three will serve one year.

Two of the educators did make plea agreements: one will serve six months of jail on weekends and the other will avoid jail entirely but serve probation for five years.

The trial was one of the longest-ever criminal trials in Georgia's history. The jury deliberated for eight days befor reaching the guilty verdict for most of the defendants, local TV station 11 Alive reported.

"This has been a long, long, long journey," Judge Jerry Baxter reportedly said before the verdict. "I know everyone here probably has emotions they can't describe. I know I do. But I want to tell you — I've been down here 42 years ... and I've never seen a jury that was more diligent."

"Whatever your verdict is," he added, "I'll defend it until I die."

During closing arguments in the case, a lawyer for the defense suggested that it was a ludicrous abuse of power to bring racketeering charges against school teachers, as the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported.

“Never have I seen the power of the state wielded like I have in this case,” defense lawyer Akil Secret reportedly said. “They are liars, cheaters and thieves who came up here to testify to save their own skins. This RICO stuff is overreaching. … It’s an abuse of discretion. Teachers? Racketeers? Really?"

While only a dozen ex-educators were on trial in Atlanta, dozens of teachers and administrators were initially charged and many have since pleaded guilty in exchange for their cooperation in exposing a scandal that captured national attention. A lawyer for one of the teachers on trial, Angela Williamson, previously suggested to Business Insider that her willingness to go to trial was a sign of her innocence.

"For the individuals that were falsely accused no level of plea reduction would work because their names have been associated with this scandal, and they want to clear their names," her lawyer, Gerald Griggs, told Business Insider last year.

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(AP)Beverly Hall holds up her award after she was named the 2009 Superintendent of the Year. She was later indicted for cheating before dying of cancer in 2015.That scandal might not have been uncovered if it weren't for a pair of ambitious reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). Back in 2008, Heather Vogell, now a reporter for ProPublica, noticed unusual gains at some schools on a standardized test called the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test (CRCT). As she explained to the Huffington Post, the gains seemed unbelievable even to the naked eye.

The article she ended up publishing in December 2008 with computer-assisted reporting specialist John Perry is alarming. That initial article looked at unlikely gains at several schools, including Atherton Elementary School, where nearly 88% of the kids were living in poverty as of 2010. Half of the school's fifth-graders had failed the CRCT in the spring of 2008. The 32 kids were all forced to retake the test. Every single one of them passed, and 26 scored at the highest level, Vogell and Perry wrote. More from that article:

A miracle occurred at Atherton Elementary this summer, if its standardized math test scores are to be believed ...

No other Georgia fifth grade pulled off such a feat in the past three years. It was, as one researcher put it, as extraordinary as a snowstorm in July. In Atlanta.

Of course, Atherton was only a small part of the story. Vogell told HuffPost that the story prompted a number of teachers to contact her about rampant cheating at Atlanta's schools under the leadership of Superintendent Beverly Hall, who was indicted along with dozens of others. (Hall died of breast cancer earlier this month, before she could take the stand at trial.) 

While the AJC kept digging into the story, the state of Georgia conducted its own investigation, which in 2011 uncovered cheating at 44 schools that involved at least 178 educators, according to The New York Times.

That investigation relied largely on a third-grade teacher named Jackie Parks, who admitted to state investigator Richard Hyde that she had sat with six teachers in a windowless room to change test answers the week of state testing.

Parks agreed to wear a wire to school and record her fellow teachers.

"During his 35 years as a Georgia state investigator, Richard Hyde has persuaded all sorts of criminals — corrupt judges, drug dealers, money launderers, racketeers — to turn state’s evidence, but until Jackie Parks, he had never tried to flip an elementary school teacher," The Times reported in March 2013. "It worked."

"What happened to our children, it was sad, it was ugly," prosecutor Clint Rucker told the jury, according to the AP. "They were cheating and it's not right and I'm asking y'all to do something about it." 

Atlanta schools cheating case judge keeps word on sentences

ATLANTA (AP) — True to his word, a judge showed mercy to former Atlanta public school educators who accepted responsibility for their role in a widespread conspiracy to inflate student scores on standardized tests. Those who refused to admit guilt and agree to other conditions set by prosecutors, he treated much more harshly.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter had delayed sentencing by a day and encouraged the former educators to negotiate deals with prosecutors. He made it clear Monday they would face prison time if they took a chance and let him sentence them. But only two of them took deals.

On Tuesday, Baxter sentenced the eight who rejected deals to between one and seven years in jail, despite their lawyers' pleas for probation and community service. They are expected to appeal and will be free on bond while the appeals are pending.

"All I want from any of these people is just to take some responsibility, and they refuse," Baxter said, his frustration clear in clashes with defense attorneys.

The two who struck deals were rewarded: Baxter gave a former teacher a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew at home for one year and gave a former testing coordinator six months of weekends spent in jail. They'll also serve five years on probation.

A state investigation found that as far back as 2005, educators from the 50,000-student Atlanta school system fed answers to students or erased and changed answers on tests after they were turned in. Evidence of cheating was found in 44 schools with nearly 180 educators involved, and teachers who tried to report it were threatened with retaliation.

DA: Atlanta Cheating on Tests Is 'Harmful'Play video

In 2013, 35 educators were indicted on charges including racketeering, making false statements and theft. Many pleaded guilty before the trial, and some testified at the months-long trial. The jury acquitted one of the 12 former educators who went to trial and convicted the other 11 of racketeering.

"This was very, very remarkable, to have the judge sort of give the defendants a second chance," said University of Georgia law professor emeritus Ron Carlson. "The thing that maybe was a little surprising was the reticence of the defendants to step forward and do that."

Bob Rubin, who represented former elementary school principal Dana Evans, said the decision to turn down the deal wasn't hard for his client.

"She couldn't say something that wasn't true," he said, referring to the insistence by the prosecution and the judge that the negotiated deals include an acceptance of responsibility.

Those who took the deals — former teacher Pamela Cleveland and former testing coordinator Donald Bullock — waived their right to appeal. They also agreed to accept responsibility, reading aloud a statement apologizing to students, parents and the court.

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Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter describes how the three former SRT directors were at …

Baxter eventually agreed to let all the defendants qualify for first-offender status, after initially denying it for some. That means their records can be wiped clean once they've completed their sentences.

Misconduct by educators rarely ends up in criminal court, and the fact that so many of them received jail time sends a strong message, Carlson said.

"These sentences will send shockwaves through the world of education," he said, adding that he believes it will be nearly impossible going forward for an administrator to pressure a teacher to cheat.

Baxter reserved the harshest punishment for three regional directors who oversaw multiple schools and were "at the very top of this scandal." For them, Baxter went above prosecutors' recommendations of three years imprisonment. He ordered them to serve seven years in prison with the remainder of a 20-year sentence on probation, 2,000 hours of community service and a $25,000 fine.

During sentencing, Baxter called the cheating "pervasive."

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Former Atlanta public school SRT Director Tamara Cotman listens during sentencing on Tuesday, April  …

"It's like the sickest thing that's ever happened in this town," he said.

Former Superintendent Beverly Hall was among those indicted, but she did not stand trial because her lawyers argued successfully that she was too sick. She died last month from complications of breast cancer.

The 11th convicted former educator had a baby over the weekend and will be sentenced later.

District Attorney Paul Howard told reporters after sentencing that his goal all along was to get the community to pay attention to what happened in Atlanta schools and to make sure the affected children get some relief.

"We believe the loss that we suffered was a community loss," Howard said.

He said his office is in talks to create the Atlanta Redemption Academy, which he said will seek to identify and assess the students who were hurt by the cheating scandal and to provide solutions for them, including help getting a job or GED training or assistance getting into college.

Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., and Rev. Gerald Durley, a former administrator at Clark Atlanta University and the Morehouse School of Medicine, have been tapped to head the board of the planned academy, Howard said.

Atlanta schools cheating case judge keeps word on sentences

White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system - The Washington Post

White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system - The Washington Post:

White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system

 It is hard, at first, to find anything wrong with the idea that some public schools should have the freedom to be a little different. This was the original pitch for charter schools, as think-tank scholars Richard Kahlenberg and Halley Potter recount in their recent book A Smarter Charter.

“Schools were meant to be laboratories for experimentation from which the traditional public schools could learn,” Kahlenberg told the Post’s Valerie Strauss last week.

[Q&A with Richard Kahlenberg and Halley Potter]

President Obama has lavished praise on charters for this same reason,calling them “incubators of innovation in neighborhoods across our country.” His administration has provided more in charter school grants than any other.

It’s true that the charter movement has a sunny side. KIPP schools, for instance, mostly serve low-income and minority students, putting them through extra-long school days and imposing strict rules on their behavior. Many KIPP schools have accomplished what their public school counterparts couldn’t: yanking up test scores for kids on the wrong side of the achievement gap.

But for every successful school, there have also been failures. The research is mixed on the performance of charter schools, and it’s a mistake to believe that different is necessarily better. The question then becomes one of equity: Who gets to attend the good charter schools?

Setting aside the drama between charters and teachers unions, or complaints that charter schools lead to the privatization of public education, there has been the persistent critique that charters increase inequality by plucking advantaged students out of traditional public schools.

The most recent cautionary tale comes from North Carolina, where professors at Duke have traced a troubling trend of resegregation since the first charters opened in 1997. They contend that North Carolina’s charter schools have become a way for white parents to secede from the public school system, as they once did to escape racial integration orders.

“They appear pretty clearly to be a way for white students to get out of more racially integrated schools,” said economics professor Helen Ladd, one of the authors of the draft report released Monday.

Charter schools in North Carolina tend to be either overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white—in contrast to traditional public schools, which are more evenly mixed. Compare these charts from the report:

The bottom chart shows students that attend North Carolina’s regular public schools. There is a healthy variety of schools with different racial makeups. Only about 30 percent of students attend schools that are highly segregated, meaning schools that are more than 80 percent or less than 20 percent white.

The top chart shows students at North Carolina’s charter schools. More than two thirds attend schools that are highly segregated. You can see on the chart because the histogram has two humps, one at each racial extreme.

The charts also show how racial makeups have shifted over time. By 2014, a fifth of charter schools were overwhelmingly — more than 90 percent — white. In 1998, less than 10 percent of charters were that way.

Parental preferences are part of the problem. The charter school admissions process is itself race-blind: Schools that are too popular White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system - The Washington Post:

Senate bill to rework No Child Left Behind would allow states to drop Common Core testing | NOLA.com

Senate bill to rework No Child Left Behind would allow states to drop Common Core testing | NOLA.com:

Senate bill to rework No Child Left Behind would allow states to drop Common Core testing

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Sen. Lamar Alexander discuss education issues during a 2014 conference.

 WASHINGTON -- A Senate committee Tuesday (April 14) began work on legislation backers say will fix the "broken" 14-year-old "No Child Left Behind Act, giving states and local governments more control over testing as long as they still measure student achievement.

Senate Health, Education, Labor, Health and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander said the rewrite of the nation's top education law he and the panel's top Democratic negotiated would still mandate that school systems include all students and subgroups of students in whatever accountability system they design.

 A provision added by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, would bar the federal government from using its authority to approve grants and waivers to pressure states to adopt the so-called Common Core standards. They were developed by nation's governors but are now opposed by some of its former supporters. Among them: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. David Vitter, R-La., who is running to replace the term-limited Jindal.

Cassidy, a physician, also has several amendments pending as the Senate committee moves to finalize the bill before it reaches the Senate floor during what is expected to be four days of meetings:

• One would authorizing federal funding to help states and local school districts train teachers and principals and other school leaders to understand, identify and develop curriculum for students with dyslexia. One of Cassidy's daughters has dyslexia, and he and wife helped found a Baton Rouge charter school to educate children with dyslexia after not finding suitable public school programs.
• Another Cassidy amendment, offered with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., would allow states to do their own evaluations to determine what assessment tests can be eliminated without hurting education.
•  A third, offered with Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., would authorize federal funds to cover at least a portion of the costs for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams for low-income students, as well as for adding teachers in low-income schools qualified to teach accelerated learning courses.

"Empowering parents, teachers and students starts by tailoring learning curriculums to students' needs, not government demands," Cassidy said.

Alexander, the panels' chairman, said the No Child Left Behind Law hasn't been modified since 2001, and that now the only way states can escape from its outdated requirements is by getting a waiver from the Education Department.

"We have found remarkable consensus about the urgent need to fix this broken law, and also on how to fix it," Alexander said of his negotiations with the panel's top Democrat, Patty Murray of Washington.

The bill continues the currently required two tests in reading and math per child per year in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, as well as science tests given three times between grades 3 and 12.  A pilot program will allow states additional flexibility to experiment with innovative assessment systems within states.Senate bill to rework No Child Left Behind would allow states to drop Common Core testing | NOLA.com:

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Fed-up parents revolt against state's standardized tests - NY Daily News

Fed-up parents revolt against state's standardized tests - NY Daily News:

It's not multiple choice, it's a resounding no as fed-up parents revolt against New York's standardized exams in historic fashion

 The entire structure of high-stakes testing in New York crumbled Tuesday, as tens of thousands of fed-up public school parents rebelled against Albany’s fixation with standardized tests and refused to allow their children to take the annual English Language Arts state exam.

This “opt-out” revolt has been quietly building for years, but it reached historic levels this time. More than half the pupils at several Long Island and upstate school districts joined in — at some schools in New York City boycott percentages neared 40%.

At the Patchogue-Medford School District in Suffolk County, 65% of 3,400 students in grades three to eight abstained from the test, District Superintendent Michael Hynes told the Daily News.

“There was a very strong parent contingent that spoke loudly today,” Hynes said.

OPINION: COMMON CORE TESTING IS NOT NEEDED IN NEW YORK 

At West Seneca District near Buffalo, nearly 70% of some 2,976 students refused testing. Likewise, at tiny Southold School District on Long Island’s North Fork, 60% of the 400 students opted out; so did 60% of Rockville Centre’s 1,600 pupils. And in the Westchester town of Ossining, nearly 20% of 2,100 students boycotted.

“It’s clear that parents and staff are concerned about the number of standard assessments and how they’re used,” Ossining school chief Ray Sanchez said.

Here in the city, a Department of Education spokeswoman claimed the number of opt-outs won’t be known for weeks. But there’s little doubt the boycott totals in city schools will dwarf last year’s numbers, when fewer than 2,000 pupils abstained.

At Central Park East 1, a K-to-5 school in East Harlem, 59 of 76 children refused the test, according to Toni Smith-Thompson, co-president of the Parents Association and a leader of the boycott.

“We’re very concerned about the impact a new testing proposal will have on our teachers,” Smith-Thompson said. She was referring to Gov. Cuomo getting the Legislature to approve a new evaluation system that will base 50% of a teacher’s performance on student test scores.

At Public School 29 in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, some 20% refused. And at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, 36% boycotted, local parent leaders said.

“Every year, all these hours of testing, it’s too much,” said Michelle Kupper, parent of a third-grader at PS 29.

“We disagree with how the test scores are being used to sort and to punish,” Kupper said.

In Westchester, former Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino refused to allow two of his children to take the test.

FREDRICK HESS: WHAT TO MAKE OF THE TESTING OPT-OUT TSUNAMI

“Today, Sheila and I join over 100,000 parents across New York in opting our children out of the Common Core tests,” Astorino said in a statement, a reference to the new tougher curriculum adopted by New York and other states, on which the test is based.

“Common Core needs to be replaced with better standards developed with input from teachers and parents and vetted and tested in a fully transparent process,” Astorino said.

Conservatives like Astorino have formed an unusual alliance with liberal education advocates who claim the test, developed by Pearson PLC, does nothing to help assess students.

“They’re secret, you can’t even discuss the contents of the test with anyone,” said William Cala, superintendent of Fairport Central School District outside Rochester, where 67% of students boycotted the test Tuesday.

“Any good assessment is one where you get immediate feedback, but we don’t even get the results for months after they take the test,” Cala said, and even then, teachers and students are never told what questions the students got wrong.

So how will Gov. Cuomo’s new evaluation system work with so many students refusing to be tested?

The governor’s office declined to comment for now, and state ed officials Fed-up parents revolt against state's standardized tests - NY Daily News:

Why an award-winning principal feels she must retire early - The Washington Post

Why an award-winning principal feels she must retire early - The Washington Post:

Why an award-winning principal feels she must retire early

 Carol Burris is the award-winning principal of South Side High School in the Rockville Centre School District in New York. Before she took that position in 2000, she taught at  the middle and high school levels and earned a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her dissertation, which studied her district’s detracking reform in math, received the 2003 National Association of Secondary Schools’ Principals Middle Level Dissertation of the Year Award. She was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and was tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

She has also written several books, numerous articles and many posts on this blog about the seriously botched implementation of school reform in her state — including the Common Core standards and the implementation of high-stakes Core-aligned exams — and about the misuse and abuse of high-stakes standardized tests. One of her most recent Answer Sheet posts, titled “What the ‘thoughtless’ N.Y. government just did to teachers,” critiqued the new teacher evaluation system pushed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and passes by the state legislature that makes standardized test scores all-important even though assessment experts have warned against using student test scores to assess educators. She wrote:

The New York State legislature celebrated the Eve of April Fools by making a bad teacher evaluation system even worse.   With the exception of a few principled members, the rest of the Senate and Assembly fell in line, without care or concern for the consequences their “reform” would bring. More remarkably, by the time debate was done, it was obvious that many legislators had no understanding of what they were voting into law.

The bill was bundled with the budget. There was no opportunity for the profession, including those who actually evaluate teachers or principals, to weigh in. In the end, the legislature caved to Cuomo’s demand that student test scores be 50 percent of a teacher and principal’s evaluation.

And now, she is leaving her job. After advocating for public education and against corporate education reform for years, Burris has decided to retire early. Here is the speech that she gave to a group of music teachers on Tuesday in which she announced her departure and her reasons for doing so:

I am honored to be your guest today.  The struggle against the domination of standardized testing as the measure of children, teachers and schools has deepened my appreciation of the importance of the arts in children’s lives. Music teachers instinctually understand what is at stake. Since the beginning of no Child Left Behind, you have watched time for art and music shrink, and time for tested subjects and test prep expand.

I spent the last four days of spring vacation with my 4-year old granddaughter. No matter where we went, we sang. We perfected a duo of Zippity Doo Daa, mastered a dramatic 

Why an award-winning principal feels she must retire early - The Washington Post:

The Learning Power of PISA?

Click on Wales » Blog Archive » The Learning Power of PISA?:

The Learning Power of PISA?

Professor Alma Harris says a blind spot has emerged with a focus on PISA as a target.

 While we want better educational outcomes and life chances for the young people of Wales, the question remains, at what cost? The current international obsession with PISA and its league tables of the ‘top performing education systems’ have mesmerized and entranced policy makers and politicians around the world. The consequential drive for a better position in PISA has prompted educationalists from many different countries to fly thousands of miles to Finland, China and Korea in the hope of finding the key to educational success. Inevitably, they return disappointed as the cultural contexts in which these education systems are located are so very different from their own.

While there are some features of education systems that are readily transferable, it remains the case that the cultural influences, that largely account for and explain high performance, cannot be replicated. This is not to propose that we return to a time before PISA or abandon the international tests but rather to temporarily press the pause button and ask what is PISA for and most importantly, who is PISA for? To answer the first question is relatively straightforward –PISA is an international evaluation of education systems, it is a comparative measure. Or rather it was just a comparative measure. The moment that PISA moved from a measure to a target it appears that all rationality was lost. In the blinkered drive to secure a better PISA score, the global educational game radically shifted its focus from children to numbers.

Now there are many who would say that a better PISA result is a proxy for better educational outcomes and they could be right. But how do we know that a move upwards in the PISA league tables equates with better learning experiences and better learning outcomes for young people? How do we know that a higher PISA ranking guarantees excellence and equity?

In the move from ‘measure to target’ a PISA blind spot has emerged. Firstly, there is a general acceptance that PISA is a reliable and valid measure of educational success, despite some dissenting voices. This mutual view is accompanied by an almost recalcitrant reluctance to look at PISA performance critically and in context. The less palatable aspects of high performing education systems have simply been airbrushed out. Secondly, romantic accounts of the high performing education systems are prevalent and the many causal attributions of success are popular and pervasive. The suggestion that these accounts may be flawed or simply plain wrong is to run the gauntlet of international derision. Thirdly, in the rush for PISA delivery, many in the policy-making world have not adequately analyzed what these high performing systems may be missing and what the day-to-day consequences might be for children.

A recent empirical study has collected evidence from 7 differentially performing education systems to shed light on the PISA blind spot. Its findings challenge some of the popular and widely held assumptions about the ‘high performing education systems’ identified through PISA. Not everything is as rosy as it might seem if you scratch the surface of these international rankings. Based on PISA, we should be formulating education policy based on the educational practices and processes in China or Korea. But recent commentaries and analyses underline the stark reality of being a child in the education systems in both of these countries. The relentless engagement in after-school tutoring deprives young people of sleep, social activity and sometimes sanity. If this is what it takes to be a top performer in PISA, is such misery really worth it? When you put the child back into the PISA equation being at the top looks singularly less attractive.

PISA is also very lucrative. The commercial activity that has been spawned through this single global benchmark has been astonishing. There are private consultants and companies in rich abundance eager to sell PISA solutions. To do so they have to sell stories and strategies plus the hope of success. Much of what they sell is premised on the notion that the ‘high performing countries’ have exclusive strategies and that simply replicating these will guarantee better PISA performance. Our study shows that high performing and low performing systems largely tend to use the same improvement strategies but to different effect. We have not found a ring-fenced set of exclusive strategies for the high performers but this convenient truth is still being pedaled for financial gain.

Finally, in the rush to look to the high performers in the East, no one has really asked what the East could learn from other education systems, particularly those in the West. Here are some initial thoughts. For Click on Wales » Blog Archive » The Learning Power of PISA?:

Teaching Grief: A Reflection | Young Teachers Collective

Teaching Grief: A Reflection | Young Teachers Collective:

Teaching Grief: A Reflection

stephrrivera / 2 days ago

By: Jacob Chaffin

**Trigger Warning: Suicide, Death

What follows is a reflection of the toughest week I have experienced in my first year as a teacher. Names have been changed and some events intentionally have details missing in order to respect the families involved.

A few weeks ago I woke up to a text from the principal at my school explaining that the school was experiencing a tragedy and that he needed me to stay the entire day (I’m a teaching fellow, so I only teach 4 hours a day). Next came the email from the district superintendent explaining that Mr.Wheeler, a well respected elementary teacher, had taken his own life.

Denial
I don’t think I have ever opened an email that shocked me as much as that one. In fact, it wasn’t until the 4th read that I began to understand the gravity of the situation. I slowly began to realize that an important figure in our school, someone just down the hall from me, would no longer be there. My next thoughts were of my students and accepting that his son, Jared, was in my language arts class. Dealing with loss was not something that I had experience in, nor did I feel that this was something that my teacher education courses prepared me for. I felt wholly unqualified to console Jared, my students, or other teachers. Nonetheless, I understand that there are some situations no amount of training can prepare you for. This was one of them.

Anger
When I made it to the school I immediately went to a veteran teacher to ask for advice. In a moment of honesty she expressed that she has never experienced a situation like this either, and was equally at a loss. Although it was frustrating that she didn’t have a set of strategies or best practices, it was also comforting to know that we were equals in navigating the grieving process with our students.

The principal and district responded by having the entire school staff meet in an emergency morning meeting. We were updated on the situation and informed that social workers and counselors from throughout the region were being brought into the school. We were also encouraged to do whatever we thought was necessary to help our students and fellow teachers.

Bargaining
The students slowly filled the classrooms around 10:30 am. Some students were aware of what had occurred that morning. You could see it on their faces. Meanwhile others had no clue. We, the 5th grade staff, explained that the principal and social worker would be around shortly to tell the students what had happened. Not only did the principal tell the students the facts, he also began the grieving process. He assured students that their emotions and questions were valid, and told them where they could find/reach out for support within the building.

After the meeting we split back into our separate homerooms. As expected, the students were expressing a wide range of emotions; from open grief, to silent stoicism, to passive indifference, and everywhere between. In order to facilitate a more structured space for students to express themselves and support one another, a fellow teacher and I opened up one classroom to serve just that purpose.

Depression
I didn’t have a plan or an expected outcome, but I knew that I could be doing something better for my students. I understood that taking on such a traumatic experience should not be done in isolation. We arranged the room into a large circle. I began by explaining that this would be a space for all of us to express ourselves, ask questions (whether anyone had answers or not), and share stories about Mr. Wheeler. We reiterated that all emotions were valid. The other teacher Teaching Grief: A Reflection | Young Teachers Collective: